Tag Archives: climategate

The uncertainty of science: Global warming scientists have concocted another explanation among dozens for the refusal of the climate to warm since 1998: a cold Pacific!

Where’s the heat? Greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, continue to be pumped into the atmosphere, but sometime around 1998, the rise in Earth’s average temperatures slowed, deviating from the rates predicted by models. Scientists have proposed that what some call “the pause” could be the result of a number of factors, including heat storage in deep ocean waters to unexpectedly high amounts of aerosols in the stratosphere helping deflect solar rays back into space. Now, a new study suggests that natural cycles in the Pacific Ocean are the culprit.

Since the end of last El Niño warming event of 1997 to 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean has been in a relatively cool phase—strong enough to offset the warming created by greenhouse gas emissions. But, this is just a temporary balm: When the switch flips and the waters turn warm again, the researchers say, Earth will likely continue warming.

“What this study addresses is what’s better described as a false pause, or slowdown,” rather than a hiatus in warming, says climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Some climate change deniers have taken encouragement from the pause, saying they show warming predictions are flawed, but Mann, a co-author on the study, notes that “there have been various explanations for why [the slowdown is happening], none of which involve climate models being fundamentally wrong.” [emphasis mine]

Does no one at the journal Science notice the outright stupidity of the first two paragraphs above? In the first it is posited that all the climate heat we haven’t been seeing could be stored in the oceans. In the second it is posited that a cold Pacific Ocean has offset the warming, thus causing the lack of climate warming.

If the oceans are storing the extra heat, how is it possible for the Pacific to be unusually cold?

We should not be surprised by this stupidity, however. The third paragraph shows that Science is depending on Michael Mann for its climate expertise, a global warming activist who was exposed as a fake scientist, a fraud, and a dishonest corrupter of data in the climategate emails. That this journal still goes to him for his opinions tells us quite a lot about the lack of objectivity at Science. Their use of the word “denier” for scientists who raise questions about global warming also tells us that the journal hasn’t the faintest idea how science works. The very heart of the scientific method demands skepticism. To instead equate skeptics with those who deny the genocide committed by the Nazis suggests that much of the so-called science published by Science is not science but propaganda.

Mark Steyn takes a look a one of Michael Mann’s many false claims and tears it to shreds, while also making Paul Krugman look somewhat foolish at the same time.

Michael Mann, a bad scientist who created the discredited hockey stick graph that supposedly proved global warming, is suing Steyn and others for daring to criticize him. In the process Steyn and others are finding ample material for making a great deal of fun of Mann while also finding more examples of his dishonesty and fraudulent behavior.

On Monday, The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press — along with 26 other groups including The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Fox News — filed an “amici curiae,” or “friend of the court,” brief with the D.C. Court of Appeals. An amici curiae is a brief submitted to a court to raise additional points of view to sway a court’s decision.

“While Mann essentially claims that he can silence critics because he is ‘right,’ the judicial system should not be the arbiter of either scientific truth or correct public policy,” the brief states, adding that “a participant in the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of public debate should not be able to use a lawsuit like this to silence his critics, regardless of whether one agrees with Mann or defendants.”

Just as Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg said it, I will say it also: Michael Mann is a fraud. He has no idea what it means to be a scientist, and should have been fired by his university after his climategate emails were uncovered. Instead, his university’s investigation was a whitewash and as much a fraud as Mann is.

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

I reported on Steve Goddard’s work back in January. Though these mainstream journalists are very slow in getting the story, it is good that some of them are finally waking up.

The article is quite hilarious. Again and again and again and again the climate fear-mongers have announced with absolute certainty that, unless we pass draconian government regulations, the climate was going to go crazy and we were all going to die. Sometimes they declared we only had hours, sometimes months, sometimes years, sometimes even decades, but every time they were certain they knew what was going to happen and thus we had better obey them. And anyone who dared question their certainty was worse than a fool and should be imprisoned!

Of course, none of these predictions have proven true. The climate might yet warm and even go wild, but none of these doom-sayers have done any of us any good. If things do start going bad in future years, it is now going to be very difficult to convince anyone of this fact.

Posted from Tucson International Airport. I am on the way to Denver to tape two television interviews with George Noory of Coast to Coast for his television show, Beyond Belief. Should be fun.

A U.S. college professor demands that skeptics of global warming be imprisoned.

But hey, they’re the tolerant ones, the ones who believe in free speech and consider “dissent the highest form of patriotism.” That is, they believe these things as long as you agree with them. Should you disagree, even slightly, then off with your head!

That’s the opinion of one of a number of scientists who were classified by a study to be part of the 97% consensus that supports human-caused global warming. The article asked them if the study’s classification was true, and their response was that the study was a fraud, a lie, a distortion, and simply untrue. The so-called 97% consensus was manufactured out of thin air, as many of the scientists included in it are actually global warming skeptics.

The quote that stood out most to me in the article was this one:» Read more

Several massive countersuits have now been filed against global warming scientist Michael Mann after he failed to pursue his own lawsuit againsts Canadian climate scientist Timothy Ball.

I am slightly unsure I trust this particular story, but decided to post it anyway as it is quite intriguing if true. If true, it suggests the tide has definitely turned in the battle over climate science — between honest scientists and the political activists who claim to be scientists (by which I am referring to Michael Mann).

Michael Mann doesn’t like people calling him a fraud for torturing and manipulating the climate data to create the false illusion that the climate is warming. And so, he is trying to shut down any criticism or analysis of his very poorly done science by using the power of government to enforce his will.

Two quotes from the article that are of interest:

Here is the point at which we need a little primer on libel laws, which hinge on the differentiation between facts and opinion. It is libel to maliciously fabricate facts about someone. (It is not libel to erroneously report a false fact, so long as you did so with good faith reason to believe that it was true, though you are required to issue a correction.) But you are free to give whatever evaluation of the facts you like, including a negative evaluation of another person’s ideas, thinking method, and character. It is legal for me, for example, to say that Michael Mann is a liar, if I don’t believe that his erroneous scientific conclusions are the product of honest error. It is also legal for me to say that he is a coward and a liar, for hiding behind libel laws in an attempt to suppress criticism.

These are all reasons that the lawsuit should have been summarily thrown out. It goes beyond the legitimate scope of libel and defamation laws and constitutes an attempt to suppress opinions that are considered politically correct.

And this:

In other words, Steyn’s evaluation of Mann’s scientific claims can be legally suppressed because Steyn dares to question the conclusions of established scientific institutions connected to the government. On this basis, the DC Superior Court arrives at the preposterous conclusion that it is a violation of Mann’s rights to “question his intellect and reasoning.” That’s an awfully nice prerogative to be granted by government: an exemption against any challenge to your reasoning.

I said before that I don’t know how the rest of us skeptics escaped being sued along with Steyn. Now we know. Mann is attempting to establish a precedent for climate censorship. If he wins this suit, then we’re all targets.

More global warming fraud: A close review of the sources cited in the studies that claimed a 97% scientific consensus supporting global warming has found that claim to be false.

Instead of a 97% consensus, the review found that only 1 to 3% supported global warming. Quite a difference, eh?

The review’s press release nicely summarizes the incompetence or downright dishonesty of three of these consensus studies:

The Oreskes (2004) study claimed 75% consensus and a “remarkable lack of disagreement” by the other 25% of the abstracts she reviewed. Peiser (2005) re-ran her survey and found major discrepancies. Only 1.2% or 13 scientists out of 1,117 agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) view that human activity is the main cause of global warming since 1950. Peiser found that 34 scientists rejected or doubted the alleged ‘consensus’ position outright and 44 claimed natural factors as more influential. At least 470 papers expressed no position on Anthropogenic (human-caused) Global Warming (AGW) whatsoever.

Doran & Zimmerman (2009) only assessed 79 scientists out of 3,146 respondents. Many scientists sent them emails protesting the survey design.

The recent Cook et al (2013) began with the broadest possible ‘consensus’ definition – rendering the idea of ‘consensus’ meaningless. Only 0.54% (or 64 scientists) explicitly agreed. Though Cook’s graphics on The Consensus Project website focus on fossil fuels, his study used the 1996 Houghton declaration which includes other human factors like agriculture and land-use change. Some 7983 scientists or 67% of the ~12,000 papers in the Cook study had no position on climate change. Many scientists publicly denounced Cook for wrongly assessing their work as supporting AGW when it does not.

Based on my experience talking to climate scientists as well as reading innumerable papers, I have always thought that the 97% consensus claim was weak or fishy. Now we not only have proof, we have evidence that the claim was based on lies.

The evidence shows that the data was adjusted to cool the past so that the present looks hotter. The question is: Why were these adjustments made? I can think of no justification, other than fraud and political manipulation.

More climate manipulation: NOAA fudges the numbers to turn a January cooling trend since 1930 into a warming trend.

Adjusting the numbers might be justified in certain situations, but NOAA never explains why, and the adjustments they impose always create the illusion of a warming trend, even if the raw numbers say otherwise. If the adjustments were honest, I would expect them to move the numbers up and down much more randomly. That these adjustments only go one way — in favor of global warming — either suggests they are unconsciously allowing their biases to influence their work, or they are intentionally allowing their biases to influence their work.

Either way, their work is meaningless and untrustworthy, and should be ignored as less than worthless.

Someone else has noticed: Multiple U.S. science agencies have been accused of fudging data to fake the existence of global warming.

The “adjustment” schemes in the official U.S. dataset are so drastic, according to Goddard’s analysis, that they managed to “turn a 90 year cooling trend into a warming trend,” he said, suggesting that there may be a “software bug” at work. “Bottom line is that the [NOAA National Climatic Data Center] U.S. temperature record is completely broken, and meaningless,” Goddard concluded. “Adjustments that used to go flat after 1990 now go up exponentially. Adjustments which are documented as positive are implemented as negative.”

Respected climatologist and NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer actually showed evidence of what Goddard described as early as April of 2012, saying that “virtually all of the USHCN warming since 1973 appears to be the result of adjustments NOAA has made to the data.” Commenting on the latest findings, Dr. Spencer said that his own examination of the data and corrections to account for urban heat island (UHI) effects “support Steve’s contention that there’s something funny going on in the USHCN data.” He also called the NOAA methodology for adjusting the data “opaque” and said he believes it is prone to serious errors.

This article is essentially covering what I have already noted, that much of the data coming from NASA and NOAA has been seriously compromised, with past temperatures adjusted downward without any clear justification in order to make it appear as if the climate has warmed in recent decades.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its global temperature figures for 2013. The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880. NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, said Tuesday that 2013 was the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius).

How can this be, if there has been a pause in global warming for the past 17 years, as has been admitted by the UN’s IPCC and climate scientists everywhere?

A U.S. Geological Survey science team has determined that the grizzly bear population has recovered enough that the bear can be taken off the endangered species list.

A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison, keeping fat stores at levels that allow the bears to survive and reproduce. For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising. “Bears are flexible,” he says. “It’s easier to say what they don’t eat than what they do eat.”

Not surprisingly, environmental activists don’t like this decision. They claim that, wait for it, global warming threatens the bear enough that it should not be delisted.» Read more

About two and half years ago, Dr. Myhrvold came across a 2009 paper by Dr. Erickson as he was trying to answer the question, “Why were dinosaurs big?” He said data in two of the graphs, one plotting the length of the thigh bone versus age, the other mass versus age, conflicted with each other. “I instantly knew that this couldn’t be correct,” Dr. Myhrvold said.

Dr. Myhrvold said he contacted Dr. Erickson, asking for the original data. While Dr. Erickson answered some questions, he said the data was on a computer he had gotten rid of and later that he did not have time to answer more questions, Dr. Myhrvold said.

Dr. Myhrvold was able to obtain some of the data from other researchers and thought he could do a better statistical analysis. Last year, he submitted a paper with his calculations — a fairly esoteric scientific disagreement about how best to extract reasonable generalizations from a limited number of fossils.

Dr. Erickson was one of the reviewers and argued strongly against publication. While praising Dr. Myhrvold’s accomplishments and saying the calculations appeared to be numerically correct, Dr. Erickson said the paper would not advance scientific understanding.

“In fact it will hurt our field by producing inherently flawed growth curves, misrepresenting the work of others, and stands to drive a wedge between labs that are currently cordial with one another,” he wrote. [emphasis mine]

Shades of Phil Jones of Climategate fame, who when asked for his original climate data first stalled, then stonewalled, then admitted that the data had been “lost.” Similarly, like the Climategate scientists who tried to squelch the work and careers of anyone who challenged them, the paleontologist being accused here attempted to prevent the accusation from been published.

The certainty of climate scientists:

Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, agreed the surprising amount of snowfall is a separate issue from climate change. “If you warm up the atmosphere, you can actually get heavier snowfalls in winter,” Trenberth said. “That’s one of the ironic things about global warming. Maybe we can say that without climate change, it would be colder still. [emphasis mine]

In other words, according to Trenberth the increased snow cover and cold temperatures are evidence of global warming.

The competition heats up: SpaceX has revised the schedule for its next three launches, pushing back two weeks so engineers can review issues with the Falcon 9 upper stage engine.

The debut launch of the upgraded Falcon 9 successfully deployed Canada’s Cassiope spacecraft into orbit on September 29. However, after safely deploying its payloads, the upper stage was then set to restart its Merlin VacD engine for a second burn related to SpaceX’s ambitions to create a fully reusable launch system. An anomaly with the restart held no mission impact, but the company’s CEO and chief designer, Elon Musk, did note they expected to implement corrective actions ahead of the next launch. “In the case of the upper stage relight, we initiated relight and the system encountered an anomaly and did not complete the relight. We believe understand what that issue is and should have it addressed in time for the next flight of Falcon 9,” he noted. “We essentially saw the engine initiate ignition. get up to about 400 psi and then it encountered a condition that it didn’t like. We have all of the data from the restart, so I am confident that we will be able to sort it out and address it before the next flight. We just have to iron out some slight differences of it operating in vacuum.”

I find Musk’s vague terminology about the engine issue to be interesting. I wonder if the “condition” the engine “didn’t like” was when the engine exploded, as some have suggested. (I personally am skeptical the engine exploded, however, as such a failure would probably require a much longer delay to deal with.)

Either way, the next few months should be a busy time for commercial space. Not only does SpaceX have two major commercial launches and a Dragon mission to ISS, Orbital Sciences has its next Cygnus cargo mission and Virgin Galactic claims it will be ready to fly SpaceShipTwo with passengers.

Almost all past temperatures have been adjusted downward, compared with the temperatures that were actually recorded at the time. During the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, when many record high temperatures were recorded, the readings have been adjusted downward by, generally speaking, one to one and a half degrees. These adjustments stop abruptly in the late 1990s. The effect of the adjustments is to make the past look cooler in relation to the present.

This kind of manipulation of data, changing the historical record after the fact, is done ALL THE TIME by the climate alarmists who crank out all of the data that are reported on in the newspapers. And the adjustments are always the same: they make the past cooler, so that the present will look warmer, in order to support their power-grabbing climate hysteria agenda. Whenever you hear on the radio that a temperature reading is the “warmest ever” in a particular place, you can reasonably assume that the “warmest ever” title was conferred by falsely reporting temperature readings from past decades.

And as Hinderaker properly concludes, “This is, in my view, the biggest scandal in the history of science. I can’t think of any competitor that could even come close.”

If you click on the first link, you will see that the global warming scientists quoted, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Gavin Schmidt, were all involved in the climategate emails, where they came off very badly. Moreover, there have been significant questions about the work of Michael Mann himself. I also wonder if these guys will have anything to say about the dearth of tornadoes today.

Steve McIntyre, the man who had demonstrated that Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph was a fraud, has now demonstrated that the work of a group of climate scientists attempting to resurrect it is even more fraudulent. It seems that in order to recreate the illusion of warming in the past four hundred years, the scientists, led by geologist Shaun Marcott, changed the dates on a series of ocean cores in order to get the results they wanted.

McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years.

Most significantly, the scientists made no explanation for changing these dates. It is as if they wanted to hide this decline, y’know?

The chart on the right, by McIntyre, illustrates the fraud. The black line shows the temperature numbers of the ocean cores used by Marcott. The red line shows the temperature numbers, as originally published in the scientific literature, for these ocean cores.

I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. … Although well-intentioned it is an erosion of our freedom and draws near to what I see as fascism.

Another IPCC failure, revealed in the leaked report: Not only have the models failed to predict global temperature, they also have failed to predict the amount of methane in the atmosphere.

The graph at the link is just like the temperature graph I posted on Monday. It compares actual observations with the predictions of the computer models, which all called for a hefty rise in atmospheric methane. All the models got it wrong.

In the coming days there will be much discussion of this document — such as how it appears the IPCC has finally acknowledged the importance of the Sun’s variability to climate change — but for now, I post on the right what is probably its most important admission. This graph from the leaked report shows the rise in global temperatures as predicted by all the different climate models used by the IPCC, compared to actual observed temperatures. As you can see, since the late 1990s there has been no significant increase in global temperature. Moreover, the observed data now sits outside the predicted margin of error for all the models, making every single one of these models completely wrong.

But don’t worry, these facts aren’t important. In fact, any facts that contradict the religion of global warming must be ignored. It is far more important to shut down all industry and live like cavemen, just because we have faith in our belief in global warming.

That these summits haven’t accomplished anything but allow climate bureaucrats to burn tons of airplane fossil fuel to gather in some of the world’s nicest warm weather cities during the winter — thereby making them all look like hypocrites — is not the reason these experts want to cancel the summits. They want to cancel the summits because the summits aren’t getting them the results they want: strict regulation on the lives of everyone else.

Nowhere does the article address the simple fact that in the past three years, since the release of the climategate emails, the creditability of the entire climate change field has gone to zero. The public doesn’t buy their sales pitch anymore, and thus neither do politicians, which is why no one is willing to make a deal at these summits. No one believes anything these climate experts are saying, especially since they have refused to clean up the corruption within their field.

When you try to sell government policy based on crisis, and that crisis doesn’t take place as predicted, and in fact is shown to be based on fraud and dishonesty, the sales job will eventually fail. Thus, better to forget the whole thing and make believe it never happened.

Today one mainstream newspaper finally caught up with the global warming skeptic community and recognized that a recent release of data from the United Kingdom’s Met Office shows that since 1996 the temperature of the climate has stalled. For the past sixteen years there has been no global warming, at all.

“Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America’s quest for the moon… Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America’s greatest human triumphs.” –San Antonio Express-News